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Build-a-BOff: A suggestion for revamping requisitions!

SystemSystem Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
There are any number of bugs associated with Bridge Officers.

Some species are missing. Some species/gender combinations are missing. It's still unresolved how certain races like Caitians will be represented, with plans to make bridge officers promotable to Captain.

Beyond that, one thing that always felt inherently false (and controversial) to a lot of players was to treat Bridge Officers quite transparently as a commodity, sold in stores. I'd argue this is much the same problem crafting had and to a lesser extent missions have had.

There are going to be a limited number of mechanics in an MMO, primarily buy, click, and attack. Done well, these mechanics are not so transparently similar from one execution to the next. Yes, it's a store. So is crafting in almost any video game RPG. But you succeed at designing crafting by making it feel like something other than a store, through UI, through errors, through skill points and crafting stations.

The same principle applies to Bridge Officer requisitions.

So rather than a standard "store", I have a suggestion:

Step 1: We create a "Candidate Profile", just like we create a Captain. We select the species, profession, and gender. We select the traits. This is the bridge officer we WANT to get. (And you can only make selections that you could make for your own Captain.)

Step 2: We set the priority with two attributes.

- "Ready for Duty in...": A dropdown which lets us select "immediately", "12 hours", "24 hours", "48 hours" and "1 week". This doesn't impact cost, directly.

- "Importance of Criteria": "High", "Medium", and "Low". This adjusts the cost.

Step 3: We receive the bridge officer.

Now, from there, the prospective math would be intentionally fuzzy. But the basic idea is, the lower your priority and the shorter your timetable for getting the Bridge Officer, the more errors/deviations/lower the quality you'll get.

Whereas if you pay top value in merits and wait seven days, you're guaranteed to get the BOff you designed, pretty much. (Certain traits, like "Efficient", may have an increased chance of failing to turn up even on the high settings.)

The basic idea is to more or less let us design them but have it take the form of, say, posting a want ad through Starfleet rather than buying them as objects in a store.
Post edited by Unknown User on

Comments

  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    Now... to make things interesting, beyond basic success and failure, I'd have the possibility of a Transporter Malfunction when your bridge officer arrives.

    This can lead to things like:

    Two almost identical bridge officers arriving instead of one. Each is missing a trait but each is also a step above the quality they would be anyway, including the possibility of having traits that are superior to even a standard epic bridge officer.

    A bridge officer with inverted traits. ("Mirror Universe".) So instead of "Leadership" and "Teamwork", "Ambition" and "Treachery" which would have more aggressive or opposite benefits.

    A bridge officer who is a hybrid of two races, with signature traits from each.

    These bridge officers, as candidates, are flagged "Transporter Malfunction". You can either enlist them as they are (making the malfunction permanent) or take them to a Transporter Chief aboard your ship who can swap them out for the corrected version instantly, if you so choose.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    I too have long been discomfited by the idea of "buying" people. If you were going to pay money for them they should at least be a money sink instead of an exchange item. The Boff store should let you both sell and buy but they should make it a requisition system where perhaps you bribe the personnel officer for expedited transfers. I like the idea of getting the race/traits/class you want. Better boffs are in more demand so you have to pay more.

    When you get your free boffs at promotion points they need to go back to the way you get your first one: one of each class to choose from. Sometimes I level a character to the top rank and get no Engineers at purple when that's what I need. I get 4 tacs and a sci but no Eng. Or maybe the only one I get of the class I need is a Klingon and I don't want to hear the tribbles scream with my boffs so I don't use him.

    I didn't care for the idea of waiting for your boff for a week to get a better one even though that seems realistic. The transporter malfunction idea has merit but I'm not sure just how I'd like it implemented. Maybe you should have a chance for that with every boff you get?
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    I like this idea because it's something to actually use Merits on, and it makes more sense to me to be using merits to grease palms in Starfleet to get the officers I want assigned than buying them off the exchange with ECs.

    That being said, the transporter malfunction sounds like a neat idea, but it may be a little complicated to roll out right away; I'd be happy if the first part was implimented first and then the transporter malfunctions could be rolled out later.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    Shakkar wrote: »
    I didn't care for the idea of waiting for your boff for a week to get a better one even though that seems realistic. The transporter malfunction idea has merit but I'm not sure just how I'd like it implemented. Maybe you should have a chance for that with every boff you get?

    You could make it time vs. money or any number of variations. The times I suggested are just examples.

    My core idea is that you use the basic character creation process to create a "Wanted Ad".

    You can go for a fast and cheap job search, which may result in the traits or quality being not exactly what you wanted. Or you can spend the extra time and merits to get exactly what you wanted, within a close margin of error.

    So, on one hand, you'd basically just be creating and buying a BOff. (Like I say, in an MMO, everything is basically a store, a click-item, or an enemy.) But the chance for error and heightened time and/or expense of avoiding error makes it seem less like a store and more like crafting a job ad and conducting a search for an employee.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    Bridge officers in STO are just a game mechanic. Stop trying to personify them.

    Even after playing this game and reading these forums for about a year now, I am still amazed at how many people are so completely bored with the game that they spend all of their time trying to re-imagine and re-engineer STO.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    This isn't a bad idea. I would like to see some kind of revamp of the Boff system. As an altaholic, I have never like the fact that my first few Boffs are always the same for every new toon. Later on it usually gets better because I go with an away team crew separate from my bridge crew.

    I would even be happy if the first few Boff choices were random. Every one of my toons has the Andorian female Tac officer that they picked up on the Khitomer, the Betazoid female science officer, etc. In my private STO universe, the captain has a level of trust with his crew because they have faced countless dangers together. It makes sense to me that he wouldn't want to bring in an untested officer.

    So when you are offered a Boff as a mission reward, I would like to see them be random. I can see a case for less customization here, though. A mission reward Boff is kind of like Admiral Quinn (or whoever) has noticed a particular Boff that he thinks might be a good fit for your crew, or when you're on the Khitomer tutorial there are only a small number of officers available. When you're at a station requisitioning officers, I think Leviathan99s suggestion would be good.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    I like the idea of crafting them. The way you would look at it in game grooming up and coming officers. Like they do with the military now. You would find a Ensign with the pedigree you like. Which would mean you customized him/her. Then like Leviathan99 said with the waiting with the waiting period 24 hours 48 hours or however long. This would be the specialized training in the area you would want to improve him.

    Like for instance if you wanted superior aggressive he would be trained that way to increase the trait from normal to superior. It would take like 3 days to get that officer up to superior. Not allow increases in racial traits or combination not available to that race.

    They way you could explain selling him would just approve transfer the price would just be a processing fee.

    Crafting bridge officers would just give us that much more customization. To make our crews for our away teams and bridge officers that much better.

    I think they would have to make it where space traits didn't stack. So they all wouldn't have evasive, accurate, efficiency and warp theory. Then you could get all the space traits on your ship.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    I also have felt that there should be some sort of mechanic as well for a BOff to transfer off your ship as well. As has been stated they are pretty much a piece of equipment/commodity as far as the game is concerned. Why not make it so that you don't always have the same officers. The down side to this idea would be that you would loose characters that you have customized as far as looks go, but at the same time there are potentially other options. It just occurred to me while I was typing this up that it could be an added functionality to the ready room. One could open up say a ship readiness report and there could be transfer requests in it. Now at this point you would have the option to approve or deny these requests, submit requests to Starfleet for new replacements and the like. I will be the first to admit that this would be more of a micromanaging function then alot of people would potentially care to deal with, but thats why I am looking for the thoughts of others on the concept.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    I like the idea. I've not really ever looked at merits as a currency to spend. Rather, I look at merits as a way of quantifying your reputation with Starfleet on the whole.

    I think this idea fits very well with the game's better BOs for higher ranks scheme. It sort of reminds me of what Riker had to go through in the first Titan novel to get his preferred XO.
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    Love it! Cryptic; make it so.:D
  • Archived PostArchived Post Member Posts: 2,264,498 Arc User
    edited January 2011
    one of the better ideas on the forum. Such a system to determine what BOff kinds you get should be implemented in some form by S4 at least.
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